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Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

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Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#181

Post by shawn-butler »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118
bmh100 wrote: post #57

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information secur…

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

I believe the cost to Target was quantifiably roughly US $300 million.

Some people say it materially affected their brand value but outside of the costly downtime during the holiday sales period I am not certain it affected their brand much if at all.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#182

Post by lnanek2 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #109
anton_tarasenko wrote: post #6

Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan). Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall…

>Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic Isn't Microsoft the one providing search results? If it is, then Microsoft ultimately controls the traffic, not Yahoo.

Yeah, but Yahoo could point to Google just as easy. That's where all Mozilla's money comes from. Just Yahoo has too many employees vs. Mozilla.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#183

Post by dismantlethesun »

skuhn wrote: post #68
oddevan wrote: post #3

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.

The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the…

> So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for

I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#184

Post by jsjohnst »

jimmywanger wrote: post #83
vthallam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that the latest round of negotiations would cover the part 'what if someone sues, who pays for it?". Also, Verizon got an awesome deal to buy Yahoo for $4 billion and there's no way they will walk away from it in their right mind.

I fail to see how it's an awesome deal. Verizon right now is only bidding for Yahoo's core business, not its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan shares. From what I remember, without those two assets, its core business is valued at less than zero. Why would you pay 4 billion for a company that's bleeding cash, open to huge liabilities for password breaches/backdoors, ever-shrinking user numbers, and no technology worth speaking…

> and no technology worth speaking of?

Seriously!? You really need to educate yourself if you believe that.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#185

Post by skuhn »

dismantlethesun wrote: post #183
skuhn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the…

> So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.

Tumblr does not display ads on pornographic content. It is not something that Yahoo is willing or able to monetize, and yet it represents a substantial amount (perhaps the majority) of the cost of operating Tumblr.

Maybe a future operator of Tumblr would feel differently -- but I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#186

Post by dismantlethesun »

skuhn wrote: post #185
dismantlethesun wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.

Tumblr does not display ads on pornographic content. It is not something that Yahoo is willing or able to monetize, and yet it represents a substantial amount (perhaps the majority) of the cost of operating Tumblr. Maybe a future operator of Tumblr would feel differently -- but I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.

They're not willing, but they are able.

> I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.

I'm not really certain why you'd feel that way. Most ad agencies simultaneously have an adult wing and a mainstream wing because the truth is... most people in the world are adults, and sexuality is a large part of what we consider the human condition.

It's only natural that you'd pay for services and products to aid in that.

What's not done is mixing the content verticals. You have pornographic content, then you advertise Adam & Eve products, paysites, or one of the many clothing distributors that will never be seen in a local mall.

Ironically, since tumblr lets' you use your own templates---some people are successfully doing upsells via Tumblr using "in house" advertisements for companies.

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